Dan Hodges

Dan Hodges is a former Labour Party and GMB trade union official, and has managed numerous independent political campaigns. He writes about Labour with tribal loyalty and without reservation. You can read Dan's recent work here

Ed Miliband, understandably confused by what he sees when he turns to his rightn (Photo: Eddie Mulholland)

They don’t get it. They just do not get it.

This morning Labour is staring into the abyss. Or rather, it’s staring into a mirror. For the first time Labour activists are looking at what the country is looking at. A leader whose final vestiges of credibility have been torn away. A political offer that is incoherent, reactionary and fantastical. An opposition that is staggering like a punch-drunk boxer towards the electoral finishing line.

Yet while they look, they still cannot see.

Today the Guardian has reproduced the official Labour Party “line to take” on David Cameron’s conference speech, and the election strategy underpinning it. You’ll be hearing this line a lot over the next few weeks.

That should be it. Anyone objectively assessing where British politics stands after David Cameron’s speech to the Conservative Party conference could only reach one logical conclusion. It is him, rather than Ed Miliband, who will be Britain’s Prime Minister after May next year.

Talking to MPs and advisers in the wake of the Labour leader’s speech last week, the most optimistic line I could get from any of them was the assessment: “Yes, it’s been a disaster. But the impact of party conferences is overestimated.” They’d better pray long and hard that is indeed the case. Because I’m struggling to recall a conference season – or two leaders' speeches – that have so starkly drawn the dividing line between the two men, and parties, who seek to lead their country.

In what was easily the most political address of his premiership, David Cameron tore the Labour Party to pieces…. Read More

On Tuesday 1 October 1985, the Labour Party won the 1997 general election. That was the day that Neil Kinnock finally cast aside the caution that had defined his leadership, and confronted head on the militants who were threatening to destroy his party.

It took Labour another 12 years to finally complete its journey from the wilderness of opposition to Downing Street. There were many missteps and false starts on the way. But the journey started that day in Bournemouth. Without that speech there would have been no Tony Blair, no New Labour and very possibly no more Labour governments.

David Cameron does not have 12 years. He only has seven months. And if he wants to avoid his own journey back to the wilds of opposition, then tomorrow he need… Read More

Slowly but surely, the Tories are starting to turn their conference around. After a nightmarish start, frayed nerves were calmed yesterday by a steely speech from George Osborne. And this morning the Conservative prospective parliamentary candidate for Uxbridge and South Ruislip arrived to throw his shoulder to the wheel.

Before Boris Johnson rose, David Cameron would have felt a twinge of trepidation. No one is ever quite sure what the Mayor of London is going to say until he’s actually said it – including Boris Johnson himself.

He needn’t have worried. The Blonde Buller was scrupulously on message, or as on message as someone who speaks in tidal waves of consciousness can be.

“Can I check that we are all proud Conservatives – proud of the oldest and most successful party in all the western democracies?” he boomed. “Am I right? Are there any quitters or splitters? Anyone feeling a bit… Read More

Today George Osborne wrote himself into the political history books. We will have to wait another seven months to find out the precise details of what was penned. But it will be one of two things.

Either: "George Osborne: The man who won the Conservative Party the 2015 general election." Or it will say: “George Osborne: The man who lost the Conservative Party the 2015 general election.”

We hear a lot these days about the superficiality of our politics. About how style constantly triumphs over substance. Osborne himself is frequently caricatured as one of the sharps of the Westminster game.

That charge cannot be leveled today. Like him or loathe him, Osborne delivered a speech that must rank amongst one of the bravest pre-election speeches ever delivered by a sitting Chancellor.

Yesterday evening, as details of the pensions tax cut were being pre-briefed to the journalists, rumors started to circulate of a “rabbit”… Read More

Now for the fightback. Tory strategists know that they have lost the first 24 hours of their conference. This morning the battle begins to prevent the rest of it disappearing beneath the cold waters of the Gas Street Basin.

At least the Conservatives have a template to work from. The Labour Party’s gathering in Manchester last week stands as a case study in how not to manage the first two days of the most important conference of the electoral cycle. Confronted with the spectacle of David Cameron hurling down the gauntlet of English votes for English laws, Ed Miliband and his aides responded with all the speed and alacrity of an elephant on roller skates. “What’s that? Is it a gauntlet? It certainly looks like a gauntlet. Perhaps we should pick it up. Then again, maybe not. Let’… Read More

Late on Friday evening, the Conservative official charged with arranging the main campaigning event of the party's conference received an answerphone message. It was from Mark Reckless. The Tory MP for Rochester would be “very, very happy” to accompany his colleagues and hundreds of party activists on Sunday’s trip to Birmingham Northfield, he said. He added that if they wanted, he’d also be prepared to give them all a morale-boosting pep talk on the coach.

Mark Reckless never made the coach. Less than 24 hours later he was standing on stage in Doncaster next to Nigel Farage, basking in the acclaim of the Ukip faithful.

When Douglas Carswell defected to the People’s Army, he succeeded in framing his actions as those of an honourable man. It is going to be hard for his new colleague… Read More

His weird speech made him seem out of touch with both his party and the times

Picture the scene. Ed Miliband and his advisers are gathered around the family kitchen table. Warm croissants and cups of aromatic, Fairtrade coffee fight for space among bundles of policy papers and polling reports. It is the planning meeting for the most important speech of Miliband’s life.

One of the figures at the table turns to his leader. “We need to tackle this thing head-on,” he says. “People think you’re weird. It’s not right, but there it is. So you need to tell a story about how you’re in the habit of wandering around alone on Hampstead Heath. You then need to explain how during your rambles you like chatting to women you’ve never met before – women who say thing… Read More

Nigel Farage has just delivered his speech to the Ukip faithful beneath the main stand of Doncaster racecourse. And, in another classic example of the medium providing the message, he’s been gambling.

This conference has been built around a single theme: “Vote Ukip, get Ukip.” To neutralise the Tory message that a vote for Farage is effectively a vote for Ed Miliband, Ukip has decided to drive a very large tank onto Ed Miliband’s Primrose Hill lawn.

Actually, Farage's party has decided to park its tank on the lawn of Miliband's South Yorkshire constituency, deliberately choosing its conference venue to demonstrate it has the capacity to take the fight to Labour in its northern heartlands. When the decision was taken to decamp to Doncaster it seemed like a clever ruse, a cost-free statement of political… Read More

This morning Ed Miliband has finally given the green light for air strikes – on the UK Independence party.

As the people’s army gathers for its annual conference in Doncaster – a bold incursion into Ed Miliband’s own South Yorkshire heartland – Labour has launched a pre-emptive attack on the tweed insurgents. “Ukip claim to be on the side of working people, but the truth is they’re more Tory than the Tories”, shadow minister Michael Dugher claimed in a typically conciliatory press release. “Ukip is a party of Tory people and Tory money. Now they want to go even further than the Tories by giving another tax cut to millionaires.”

Nigel Farage has got Labour rattled. Though to be honest, at the moment everything’s got Labour rattled. The party was supposed… Read More